SAIC Faculty public letter
Dear Colleagues,
Today we announce our intention to join our Museum and School staff colleagues in forming a union with AICWU (Art Institute of Chicago Workers United), AFSCME Council 31. We, the undersigned, represent non-tenure-track faculty — both lecturers and ranked adjuncts — from every academic and studio department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Non-tenure-track faculty constitute more than three quarters of the total faculty at SAIC. In building our union, we believe we can secure a much-improved position to negotiate over course rates, access to benefits, and opportunities for growth and enrichment in our pedagogical and professional practices. We need a stronger voice in shaping our own working conditions. Our intent is to build a wall-to-wall union representing the workers that have long done the heavy lifting — often invisible, unregulated, and under-compensated — to secure this institution’s world-class reputation.
Our working conditions are intolerable. We write in protest of a two-tier system of compensation and benefits that is creating a permanent underclass of contingent faculty.
Ranked adjuncts and lecturers alike are expected to provide curricular development, facilities support, institutional representation, and mentorship, all while producing the innovative ideas and images that burnish SAIC’s reputation. All of this work is required — and all of it is unpaid. Part- time faculty perform research, teaching, and service without the institutional support that similar standards obtain for our full-time colleagues.
As SAIC Provost Martin Berger has repeatedly acknowledged, part-time faculty members do not make enough money to meet the cost of living in Chicago. Although we are called “part-time faculty,” many of us are not, in fact, part-time workers. Ranked adjuncts frequently serve as long-standing core faculty in their departments, and often do the work of full-time professors, but without the corresponding titles, compensation, or job security. Lecturers, meanwhile, have recently been pushed into in-person instruction without health insurance during a pandemic; at the same time, they have been denied access to the highly competitive promotions process that is their only route to basic benefits. We have all seen our multi-year contracts gutted and professional development support halted. High-level messaging about the need for a “smaller school” has prompted concerns about layoffs in the years ahead.
SAIC prides itself on a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Here we must acknowledge that the part-time category represents the largest number of faculty who hold marginalized identities. The precarity we face is thus inextricably linked to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, classism, and the innumerable extensions and intersections of oppression. SAIC has pledged to dismantle inequity, yet the School’s imbalances in compensation, benefits, security, and support further entrench it.
SAIC’s stated institutional objective is to support a “diverse body of intelligent and creative students and faculty in an environment designed to facilitate and encourage the discovery and production of significant ideas and images.” The school exists to bring students and faculty together in a community conducive to innovative thinking and making. Meaningful research and studio work, however, are under- mined by precarious working conditions. Students are often appalled to learn how little value is placed on our work — and, by extension, on the very degrees they are going into debt to obtain, just as we did before them.
When part-time faculty are not sufficiently supported, the entire institution suffers: staff are continually engaged in training and assisting disoriented new hires; full-time faculty often have little idea who their colleagues are or how sharply their workloads and compensation diverge; students are taught and mentored by exhausted people, doing too much for too little. We believe there can be no equity without power-sharing; acting in solidarity, we can disrupt entrenched inequities at SAIC and pursue more fair-minded, equitable, and inclusive circumstances for all.
By forming our union, we aim to ensure that non-tenure- track faculty have a stronger voice in determining the conditions of their employment. The union is not an “outside party” pushing its own agenda; we, your colleagues, are the union. We urge senior leadership to honor our legal right to organize without intimidation or coercion — and to avoid wasting time and resources on expensive lawyers, propaganda campaigns, or mandatory anti-union meetings. SAIC can demonstrate its commitment to equity by respecting our right to organize.
Too often, this institution has prioritized optics and reputation over genuine excellence and equity in arts education. We, as frontline workers, represent a movement to bring the School into alignment with its purported mission.
Stand with us.
